Does Perl have an equivalent to VB (maybe in Perl Win32) for providing a GUI to run scripts from. I am trying to sell a script I built with LWP but I do not want users to install the entire development package and run commands from the command prompt.

I dont know if you can use VB to do this, you may want to try you luck with C. With C++ you can compile in a perl interpreter withing you code.

But,

You could write a VB script that exec's the command.com and references the perl.exe "The script that you want to run" and runn in hidden mode. This way it would look like a VB program, but in reality it is calling command prompts.

Any way I know this is not much and I will continue to reaserch this one.

You could write a Perl/Tk frontend using the Tk module. If you have ActiveState Perl installed, you should be able to use the PPM (Perl Package Manager) to install the Tk module, just use the command:

ppm>install Tk

The module comes with extensive documentation, however another good resource is the Learning Perl/Tk book by Nancy Walsh (published by O'Reilly).

You can also build Tk forms graphically, similar to Visual Basic's form builder, using a program called SpecTcl (available at http://programming.ccp14.ac.uk/ftp-mirror/programming/tcltk/pub/tcl/guitools/ in versions for multiple platforms, including Windows). While originally designed for creating Tcl/Tk forms, it can also save Perl/Tk verions, the SpecPerl version should be included with the distibution if I remember correctly. Also lets you create Java forms too, but I've never tried that.

Also, if you need to distrubute your program in non-source form, you might check out Perl2Exe, at http://www.perl2exe.com it's NOT free (in fact it's pretty expensive) but I bought the Enterprise edition of it it's so cool :-) Basically it lets you convert your Perl scripts into .exe files (also lets you create executables for *nix/Linux). There's a demo available, and full versions are sold seperately for each platform you can compile to (you can compile from any platform to any platform you have a license for...i.e. from Win to Win or Win to *nix etc.)

BTW, Perl2Exe only works with Perl v5.005_03 of ActiveState's Perl so far, not v5.6.0.